Solar Leads EU Electricity Generation as Renewables Hit 54%
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The EU has reached a milestone where solar power became its single largest electricity source for the first time, with renewables accounting for 54% of its energy mix, sparking discussions on the implications and challenges of this shift.
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Is the EU also ramping up (battery?) storage? Or are they getting near the max of what they can do with solar? (Or do I have it all wrong :/ )
in EU: gas, oil is still 60% of usage. You are not going to heat you home during winter with electricity anytime soon, same like we are not all gonna drive electric cars this decade.
In Czechia, winter is already dark enough to make solar in the coldest months a rounding error.
Further north, uh.
"it can be generated in one place and used in another."
It can, but we are far from having such a robust grid all across the continent. I am not even sure if we are getting closer. Both economic and political aspects come into play, which might be harder to address than the purely technical ones.
For example, France really does not want cheap Spanish solar energy to flood the French market, hence the inadequate connection over the Pyrenees.
Everyone knows that, including the European Commission, but France is one of the two really big continental players who can do anything they want and cannot be effectively punished. The "everyone is equal, but some are more equal" principle.
This = what precisely?
If you mean getting rid of oil and gas on a short scale, there won't be majority for that. By 2040 or 2050 maybe, with some significant exceptions (I don't believe in large electric jets; small aircraft maybe).
The second factor is that carbon-based fuels may become more expensive over time, so perhaps electricity costs “just” needs to remain stable to become attractive.
[1] https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/energiemonitor-strompreis-gas...
Generating chemical feedstocks from CO2, intermittent desalination, whatever process which is predicated on cheap energy.
The energy strategy of the EU was hopeless for a long time and is only marginally better now. It’s not as braindead as the monetary union but close. Germany was actively sabotaging France for a long time while having to restart coal power plants and investing in gas fuelled capacity.
Sadly the union is heavily unbalanced since the UK left.
Germany has been abusing it from the start running huge trade surplus, compressing salaries, using its excess savings to buy foreign debts instead of investing and being shielded from monetary appreciation by the consumption and investments of other countries. The euro is basically Germany robbing blind the other members while pretending to be virtuous and blocking most of what could have improved the situation.
AFAIK, they created some mechanisms after the 2008 crisis. Every country there now effectively prints money in differing rates, and the EU only regulates some limits.
Don't worry, you'll join again eventually.
I’m not too surprised about my original comment being downvoted while being entirely factually true. It was a bit much from me to expect people to understand the underside of running too much intermittent energy sources and how this is currently dealt with (the braindead part). I invite the champions of solar to explain to me the current plan of the EU for actually running the whole grid past 2050 while phasing out the coal and gas (hint: there is none).
Anyway I invite everyone to take a look at what the EU used to do nuclear, how it was purposefully omitted from the definition of clean energy for years, how they used to fine France despite its energy being clean, how it forces the French energy operator to sell at a loss, how it impedes France properly managing its dams and then look at who actually pushed for these policies while buying Russian gas and burning coal. The whole thing is a complete joke. At least they apparently saw the light on nuclear. That’s a start.
That’s a risky bet but I personally prefer that to the current situation. I would honestly be ok with staying in the union if we could exit the euro while staying but I don’t think it’s possible.
Not sure what you're referring to here?
But the debt is denominated in euro. If you leave euro and create a new currency, the bonds will still be in euro, while your new currency will be worth much less. It's basically easier and less painful to default on the spot than to go through this.
I honestly can't understand the urge to get bankrupt. France is already famous for the revolution and eagerness to protest but this looks like you want to cause chaos just for the sake of it.
Anyway, independently of the debt, the euro is a huge weight to drag for the French economy, technically for pretty much all the economies of the eurozone part for Germany.
I don't see French economy being very dynamic without the euro. If the thought is to take on lot of debt denominated in local currency and then inflate it away (faster than what happens with euro), that only makes things volatile, not dynamic.
1. It is widely recognised, and irritates the poorer countries, that Germany and France benefit from the relatively weak Euro for their exports.
2. If you left the EU and obviously the Euro and devalued your currency, you end up with wild inflation. If there is anything a population hates, it is high inflation. Given your political situation in France currently, no government would last a year in that scenario.
3. Devaluing obviously causes bond rates to rocket, which means rolling over your current debt because extremely serious.
4. On top of that, mortgage rates rocket, people hate that too.
There is a reason countries don't just print money and devalue all the time. If it was that easy, everyone would do it.
The Greek crisis is very different because the debt was mostly held by German banks - the German did to do something of all these excess savings and the Greek economy suffered a lot from the euro. Reforms were needed but the way the whole thing was handled is a disgrace.
Then, Greece had a choice, just like every other country always has a choice when faced with a debt crisis: Accept the terms of people who will bail you out, or default. It is always like this, because no-one is going to bail you out if it is apparent that the situation will just repeat. The Greek people voted to reject the terms of the bailouts, which meant leaving the Euro, printing their own currency, and accepting that the global capital markets would not be buying their bonds for the foreseeable future. The Greek government saw the choice and ignored the people, because they knew the alternative to the bailout was far, far worse. The only reason they ran that referendum was to try use it to bargain for better terms, they never had any intention of defaulting.
The question is not if the Greek could refuse. The question is was the terms put forward by "the Greek creditors", that is to say Germany, were fair and in the interest of the union as a whole. If I put a gun to your head, no one will listen if I tell them I gave you a choice you could have refused. You just had to take the bullet.
Germany basically refused to Greece what they themselves got in 1953 despite the situation being in part caused by their own complete mismanagement of the economy, a situation they have yet to fix by the way.
I don't know what is more repugnant: what they did or that there is people defending it and having so little shame they pretend others are misinformed.
This is an argument from fallacy. Not worth discussing further when you give replies like this.
My understanding is that this was mostly a problem for eurozone countries and with the shared use of the Euro as a currency, rather than with the EU.
It seems insane to me that we agreed on partnering with a country that was aggressively against nuclear for a nuclear project.
It has been a long time since the last war now and everybody seems to have forgotten how Germans can be dangerous arrogant ideologues. The influence they yield on the EU is crazy and I don't think there is a way to properly balance it now. They are actively committing acts of war by the way of their political institutions but we do nothing. Inevitably the past will repeat itself...
During winter, France uses ~50% more electricity per day than during summer. And during cloudy days in winter, solar produces 10%-15% what it produces during summer.
If you don't have month-long battery storage, in order to be fully solar based France would need to produce 20 times more electricity than needed during summer.
For the latter, see standard-thermal.com
I've heard this before but can you explain why? A cursory web search tells me batteries hold charge pretty well for 6 months. And the new sodium batteries from CATL are certainly cheap enough.
There are varieties of batteries with somewhat lower capex and lower charge/discharge rates. Form Energy's iron batteries are of this kind. They would occupy an intermediate timescale, perhaps ~1 week, which could be good for leveling wind output.
This doesn't matter. If you look at the monthly stats, solar panels in France produce ~3x more in the summer than the winter at a month by month view. As such, you only need 3x extra overall, and some day to day storage.
So, it's ~15 years away at current growth rates?
But they'll probably just get months-long storage at some point.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that.
This is ALL renewables, not just Solar - the article states that Solar is ~20% now in the EU.
Wind typically counts for ~15%, and Hydro (which may or may not be counted as renewable) counts as ~15%.
So most places can pretty easily get to ~40% solar, ~15% wind, ~15% hydro = ~70% renewable.
Throw in ~20% Nuclear (basically all of Europe before Germany sh*t the bed), and you're at ~90% - with limited need for storage - a large portion of which could come from infra that already exists for pumped hydro and regular overnight solar storage.
We're quite a ways away from diminishing returns.
We're ~8 years away from a global ~40% of electricity coming from solar EVEN IF it continues to grow at ~30% YoY.
Why or when wouldn't one consider hydropower a renewable energy source?
There are several reasons. It's destructive, has very high emissions, and doesn't actually generate that much power because we have long-ish drought seasons. Hydro was fueled or fueling corrupt construction deals while destroying natural reserves and wildlife. In some cases, night-time hydro was much more expensive than any other power source.
Solar and wind have no rotational mass, are unreliable and unpredictable
Solar and wind are quite predictable - it's just weather forecasting. We have a pretty good idea what it is going to produce 7 days from now - we just can't control it.
Solar and wind can provide rotational mass. Existing installations just aren't engineered for it, because grid following makes more sense in a fossil-heavy grid. If extra inertia is needed, batteries are the perfect source for it, as it can instantly scale from -100 to +100 to soak up excess or fill in shortages. Or we can just install a bunch of flywheels, no big deal.
Six-fold increase in battery capacity in Europe predicted by 2029.
With some software tweaks, these are not only base load compatible, but can even take on grid frequency stabilisation.
Check out recent episodes of Tue Volts podcast. It's actually a bit crazy.
You can get pretty high before the economics get sketchy. Below analysis concluded that for many sunny places that point is in the 90%+. Most of EU will be lower than said sunny places, but point is it's not 40%. And the sprinkling of wind, nuclear, geo, hydro means there is a fair bit of room to still push.
Plus both solar and storage tech is still moving rapidly
https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2025/06/Ember-24-Hour-S...
If there is an important threshold when solar reaches 40% of the full year's production, then solar will need to almost quadruple before that's a concern. For all of 2024, solar was 22.4% of renewables, and renewables were 47% of the total[1], meaning that solar was 10.5% of total electricity over the full year.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/en/web/products-eurostat-news/...
I love exploring these graphs: https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...
EU is doing just slightly better than US. US has the advantage of its fossil fuels but it's actually China that is doing the revolution. They are accelerating and at some point not too far away will reach abundance and switch off all the fossils.
It's unwise that the new US administration be pushing for the opposite of China. But what's actually beyond me is the existence of Europeans that demand more fossil fuels. It is double ridiculous because EU doesn't even have these fossil resources at any viable scale. It is largely imported, they must be on the payroll of US and Russia or very stupid.
IMHO EU should just drop everything and do China level or even beyond transition to Solar and similar.
They might've just started the war 4 years earlier, then.
A pro-Russian politician took existing EU integration plans and went "fuck that, we love Russia" instead and Ukrainians particularly in the West of the country turned out on the streets in a huge protest. In the aftermath, with Ukraine now definitively not in Russia's sphere of control, Putin ordered seizure of the eastern parts of Ukraine.
Four years earlier doesn't make sense, Russia has plans that are expected to work out in their favour, and Putin is less secure in 2010 than he is today, invading a neighbour looks very ambitious in 2010.
Moving the more recent part of the invasion - which starts with trying to seize Kyiv - forward by four years maybe makes more sense, but that compresses a lot of timeline.
Traitorous climate frauds like Bjørn Lomborg responded by claiming that wind power didn't work and we should instead invest in some new unspecified alternative to wind and solar.
Also, due to the nature of solar this increase is actually sustainable for quite some time, these panels are manufactured goods and once you have the production lines in place it keeps going until the demand is saturated.
It’s completely expected for Europe’s installation of solar panels to begin tapering off as they get more return on investment by installing battery storage and decarbonizing other parts of the economy.
Not saying we should continue using fossil fuels forever, but being unrealistic about how hard the transition to intermittent renewables will be isn't sensible
There’s quite a bit of complexity leading to the “simply storing in a tank” step.
It doesn't solve the problem completely, but it surely helps.
https://www.ess-news.com/2025/09/10/new-alliance-aims-to-unl...
Electricity might become free on sunny days, but you'll still have to pay serious money for it during cloudy windless days. Even a solar panel operating at 10% capacity becomes worth the effort.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...
But as you say, the US is more wasteful with energy, which can make it seem better if you look only at absolute levels of the clean energy, and really bad if you look at absolute levels of the dirtier energy.
There is an interesting in-depth analysis by Fraunhofer: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p... (see page 25, for example).
Considering that the EU classifies nuclear as equally renewable as solar, why should we rely solely on solar?
PS: I built a low-energy house, heat it with a heat pump, and have PV on my roof.
Germany has plenty of salt formations for very cheap hydrogen storage, and there are no geographical constraints on thermal storage.
Given that this all-nuclear world has electrolyzers, what then prevents these from being driven by renewables (perhaps buffered short term by batteries), and the hydrogen then stored (as has been done for decades in underground storage caverns, just like natural gas is stored)? And once that is done, what prevents some of that hydrogen from then being profitably used to drive turbines when electricity prices are high? Gas turbines burning hydrogen are nearly identical to ones burning natural gas (just minor differences in the combustors) and have been available industrially for decades.
Using reasonable projections for cost (some of which have already been superseded by lower figures), we can estimate the cost of providing synthetic baseload from wind/solar/storage in Europe, using historical weather data. It comes in cheaper than nuclear.
https://model.energy/
At least that's what I hear people saying.
Paying for the plant but not having to pay for it to run most of the time is probably cheaper than having it running most of the time.
Maybe there's opportunities for net metering for customers with backup generators. At the right price per kWH, I would run my generator and feed into the grid... personally, my fuel cost is likely too high for that to make sense very often, but I think there's likely some hidden capacity there with the right incentives.
Germany will require 100-150 GW capacity which cost about 1000 EUR/kW and would require an investment of 100+B EUR.
Electricity prices already skyrocketed in Germany and no end in sight.
Listen: I invested in PV, in low energy houses, in heat pumps - but the PV/wind strategy doesn’t work the way people would like them to in their ideology and Germany has proven that.
Now that you've built those plants, would you rather pay to operate them year round, or only when needed?
PV/wind won't help you reduce capex for winter, but it should reduce opex on gas. And that's something.
Spending capex on interconnections may reduce the total dispatchable capacity needed; if it's done carefully. Having more time zones in one grid helps because peaks correspond with time of day; having more latitude helps because day lengths and cloud cover varies. Having more of both helps because still air tends to be geographically bounded. But long distance transmission is expensive.
You can't generate excess electricity because you don't have enough land or rooftop (I mean maybe you do, I'm talking about the typical homeowner). Utilities can overbuild panels because they're extremely cheap.
LFP batteries have a self-discharge rate of 2-5% per month. Once they're cheap enough, over-building batteries to move summer sunshine into the winter months also becomes an option*. At $100/kwh, you could power Sweden 6 months a year for about $60bn (EDIT: $6tn, sorry) in batteries (yes labor and everything else will probably double that cost). And that doesn't even account for recent advances in sodium batteries, which reportedly bring that price down to $20/kwh
* (Any battery experts know why this might be wrong? I'm using basic arithmetic, not physics. That tells me a battery charged to 100% in July or August will still have > 70% charge left in December)
In any case, at $100/kwh, it would cost $250bn (EDIT: $25tn sorry) in batteries and maybe the same in installation costs to power Germany for 6 months a year. At the lower $20/kwh price tag it would be more like $5tn, compared to Germany's ~$4.5tn GDP. Over 10 years it could be done.
(And 6 months' storage is maybe too much anyway)
This isn't to say they can't import it from elsewhere, they just can't make any of their own. Adding more capacity wouldn't do anything, it would take an incredible amount of batteries to handle the more extreme end of those "dark periods".
https://www.tech-for-future.de/dunkelflaute/
Seasonal or month-long periods of low-generation are another matter, and as-yet an unsolved problem. It may be that synthesizing fuels ends up being a sensible option here.
We’ll, I’ll take that back - we probably solved all that by running our economy into the ground
Please do go ahead and show some data on when we had a month long solar eclipse without wind.
A couple of weeks happen from time to time
I'm not aware of that, because it's a lie. Storage is another alternative.
Hint: we’ll still end up producing more carbon emissions than France. Storage doesn’t exist in the magnitude needed.
With hydrogen available renewables can straightforwardly get to 100%. Germany has plenty of geology for hydrogen storage. As I mentioned elsewhere, long term thermal storage is also a possibility, with recent developments there suggesting very competitive capex.
(The French have given up on their breeder development program, cancelling Astrid, the proposed next project, until at least 2050.)
Renewables and storage seem much more quickly scalable than nuclear, as demonstrated by the yearly percentage rate of increase in their deployment.
France generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production.
What they have done is that they have outsourced the management of their grid to their neighbors and rely on 35 GW of fossil based electricity production both inside France and their neighbors grids. Because France's nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity and too little when it is actually needed.
Their neighbors are able to both absorb the cold spell which very likely hits them as well, their own grid as the French exports stops and they start exporting to France.
Because solar is ~5x cheaper and 1000x more deployable
5x cheaper means you can add the cost of storage on top and it's still cheaper than nuclear power.
You need either nuclear or gas (like 100% capacity, idle most of the time) in addition to massive investments into the grid to make it work (at least in Germany).
I don’t understand how people seem to NOT understand that you need the ENTIRE capacity when wind and solar act up as a backup and what the cost of that is. It’s not me making that up but the Fraunhofer: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...
There is no storage in existence that would allow us to run an industrialized country from battery backup. We are talking ballpark 20 TWh of storage which would require 100 MILLION ton Tesla Megapack gear.
This is straight up misinformation. Nuclear power is not a peaker.
Gas is, batteries are. Nuclear power provides baseload and must be paired with a peaker too - almost always gas (France uses epic amounts of gas when its nuke plants are down for maintenance).
The reason why we have gas as a peaker instead of batteries? Gas is cheaper, and batteries dont get lavished with subsidies like nuclear power does.
>I don’t understand how people seem to NOT understand that you need the ENTIRE capacity when wind and solar act up
We look at real models based upon real data, for example:
https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...
FUD and misinformation is a bad way to approach any scientific topic, whether vaccines or energy policy. Id recommend not doing that.
https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...
I’m not saying “no gas”. I’ saying: no more PV or wind because we already stress our grid with too much electricity on some days and we have periods of days or week where we need to essentially generate 100% without any PV or wind.
Maybe some street smart and “nuanced” thinking is something to consider? :-)
I'm not doubting you, but we know that in some countries solar will have a power ceiling (cloud cover, etc)
Here a blog with an interactive website to explore that:
https://electrotechrevolution.substack.com/p/renewables-allo...
> This means renewables are economically worthwhile based solely on the fuel savings they provide. Even if they would never fully replace fossil power plants, but only reduce how much fuel those plants consume, they would be worth it. Simply reducing fossil fuel use during sunny or windy periods—or when batteries charged from these periods are available—saves more money than the entire investment in renewables. That's how remarkably cheap solar, wind, and batteries have become—and precisely why they're winning around the world today.
I think this paints your statements in a different light. You omitted the studies focus on social aspects.
I do trust their math on carbon emissions and capacity calculations wrt to renewable energy and gas power plants though.
Can you follow?
Which does not capture the cost of a nuclear plant being forced off the market because no one is buying its electricity during the day and they have to amortize the cost over a 40% capacity factor instead of 85% like they target.
And this can be a purely economical factor. Sure a plant may have a 90% capacity factor but if the market clears at $0 50% of the time they still need to recoup all the costs on the remaining 50%, pushing up the costs to what would be a the equivalent to a 42.5% capacity factor when running steady state.
Take Vogtle running at a 40% capacity factor, the electricty now costs 40 cents/kwh or $400 MWh. That is pure insanity. Get Vogtle down to 20%, which is very likely as we already have renewable grids at 75% renewables and it is 80 cents/kWh.
Take a look at Australia for the future of old inflexible "baseload" (which always was an economic construct coming from marginal cost) plants.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant...
Coal plants forced to become peakers or be decommissioned.
Electricity is fundamentally priced on the margin and if you start forcing nuclear costs on the ratepayers they will build rooftop solar and storage like crazy, leaving you without any takers for the nuclear based electricity.
You can say that "no one would do that" but it is the end state of the market.
> Considering that the EU classifies nuclear as equally renewable as solar, why should we rely solely on solar?
Why waste money on horrifyingly expensive new built nuclear power? Who looks at Flamanville 3, Hinkley Point C and friends and draw the conclusion that they want some more?!?
The regime can just make it illegal to do rooftop solar or home batteries. In a functioning country this is easy enough to push through as a safety measure (lithium battery fires are legit scary, at least in videos). In the U.S. you can just start a campaign to get people fired for endangering their neighbors with dangerous woke energy, no legislation needed at all.
Given that we already have a bunch of Gas plants, do we need to build new ones, or could we just maintain the ones we have?
Most current plants are either designed to run basically all the time, or only run a couple of hours multiple times a day.
A renewable grid needs generation which is fully shut down for months, but can scale up to 100% within days when weather forecasts predict it'll be needed. The current plants might work as a stop-gap measure, but long-term we'll need to build something designed specifically for this application.
This makes them fundamentally flawed as backup generation. Nuclear is already the most expensive source of electricity when operating at full capacity, having it run only 5% of the time makes it completely unaffordable as it'll cost 20x as much.
When used traditionally, nuclear costs about $175/MWh. Solar and wind costs about $50/MWh. Use nuclear as backup and it'll cost $3500/MWh. Orrr, you've suddenly got a $3450/MWh budget to spend on storage for renewable energy...
Lmao, meanwhile France had the cheapest clean electricity of the developed world for the past 70 years, while Germany paid 2-5x more depending on the period
It's only expensive for new built reactors in Europe because we've given up on the technology a long time ago, countries which made it a national priority and kept the know how are still enjoying cheap nuclear energy. If Germany didn't spend decades and billions on green lobbyists in Bruxels the story would have been very different
Why do you think China is building 30 new reactors right now and have planned for dozen more? They have all the coal and manufacture the vast majority of solar panels and windmills worldwide but they still go for nuclear.
Almost as if having a diversified energy mix is desirable...
We still need more storage and generation, but a better grid would help a lot.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...
But China has also electrified a lot of its cars and trucks, and continues to do so rapidly.
Claims like this would need to be quantified further in order to make any real predictions, but I think these sorts of predictions about future electrification may turn out to be shockingly wrong.
For example, many predict we have or will soon hit peak oil. Whereas I would wager it will continue to grow. You didn't mention global oil production, but I want to get specific. 50 years from now I think global oil production will be higher than it is today.
There is a strong desire by many for oil production to decrease and to electrify, but the incentive structure just isnt there. It's too cheap and useful and the energy demand is effectively unlimited. Im not even saying we shouldnt move away from it. Just that we wont.
Currently we're in a situation where OPEC, remembering 2014 and hell bent on diversification, is offloading record quantities of crude into the market, to ensure that American production stays infeasible.
The catch is that making coal liquid requires a lot of energy. If that energy comes from coal itself it is a very dirty process. But if energy comes from renewables or nuclear, it is not an issue.
In fact with renewables and storage leading to cheaper electricity, the price competitiveness of coal-based liquid fuels will only get better.
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